Only If You're Lucky
Stacy Willingham
For my mom, my hero
If I ever read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
PROLOGUE
One day we were strangers and the next we were friends. That’s usually how it works with girls.
How effortlessly we glide from cold shoulders in public to applying each other’s lipstick in sweaty bar bathrooms, fingertips touching in a swarm of warm bodies. From spreading hot-breathed rumors behind cupped hands to tossing compliments across the room like darts, aiming for a bull’s-eye, but really just hoping for something to stick. I remember thinking she chose me, specifically, for some reason I’d never understand. Like she spotted me from across the hall, eyes on the carpet and shoulders hunched high as I tried to hide my underwear at the bottom of the laundry basket—flowers and stars and little pink pinstripes, embarrassingly high school—and decided: I was it, it was me. Her best friend.
And from that moment on, I was.
“Spin it,” Lucy says, and I feel myself blink. My eyelids are heavy, the room twirling gently like our old dorm washing machines, slow and clunky and always broken. There’s a permanent cloud of smoke in the house—cigarette, candle, incense, weed—caked into the blankets, the couch cushions. Like if you slapped them, they’d cough.
I can still picture all my mom’s country clubbers tucking my hair behind my ear, fingers lingering against my cheek like I was their own personal porcelain doll. Thinking me delicate, breakable, as I loaded boxes into the trunk while they gushed about their own time at school with distant smiles and tears in their eyes.
How sure they were that I would finally find my people, my girls.
“Just you wait,” they had said, strings of pearls wound tight around their necks like designer nooses, my own mother watching curiously from the lawn. “College is different. They’ll be your friends for life.”
That’s what I had been hoping for. Different. But friends for life is a myth, a fable. A feel-good fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid having to think too hard about facing the world alone. I had believed it once. I had held it tight against my chest like some kind of feral animal I’d claimed as my own before it scratched my neck and wriggled itself free, leaving me battered and bloodied and alone.
“Margot.”
I look up to find Lucy staring straight at me, her pupils wide and round like cigarette butts. I swear there’s smoke coming from her eyes, curling into nothing.
“Spin.”
I blink again like I just woke up from a dream and found myself here: thighs stuck to the hardwood, back digging into the corner of the coffee table. Everything feels dreamlike, hazy, faded like the milky bottom of the stale water glass sitting neglected on my nightstand. We’re in a circle—Lucy, Sloane, and I—our legs pretzeled on the floor with the knife Lucy yanked from the kitchen block between us. Nicole is on the couch, detached as usual, and I reach for the knife, finally flicking it with my fingers. Watching as the shiny tip rotates in a circle like we’re a strange kind of clock: three, six, nine, twelve.
We all hold our breath as it slows to a stop, the point aimed directly at Lucy.
I see Sloane perk up out of the corner of my eye, her back lengthening like a meerkat suddenly aware of some distant danger. Even Nicole darts a look in our direction, skinny frame slumped over a pillow. Hugging it hard with toothpick arms.
“Truth or dare,” I say, my voice raspy and raw. My lips are pulsing, tingling, and I take another swig from the Svedka bottle between us because I need something to coat my throat.
Lucy smiles, like the question is rhetorical. Like I shouldn’t have even bothered to ask. Then she leans over and grabs the knife, her fingers curling around the handle, one by one, as naturally as grabbing the base of a curling iron, a bottle of beer. The same way her hand grips my wrist when she finds me in a crowded room, pulling me away and into the night.
They were right, those women. College friends are different. We would do anything for each other.
Anything.
CHAPTER 1
We’re seated next to each other, shoulders touching, side by side like a prison lineup.
I can feel Nicole’s hip bone jutting into my side; Sloane can’t stop picking at her cuticles, sprinkling dead skin across the floor like salt. We’re in our pajamas, cheeks still smeared with last night’s mascara, and Nicole looks about five years younger with her baby-faced skin and braided pigtails, barely a teenager. Sloane’s dark hair is knotted up in a scrunchie, a single curl jutting out like a corkscrew, and I don’t even know what I’m wearing. Some T-shirt I probably picked up off someone else’s floor and claimed as my own, armpit stains and everything.